Ben Borgers

Read the Dang Thing Out Loud

March 22, 2022

There are people who enjoy the process of editing their writing. I am not one of those people.

Itā€™s really hard for me to sit down and actually edit my own writing. I think it comes from a place of impatience; a place of not wanting to spend more time than necessary to write something.

I think it also comes from the fact that I realized in middle and high school that my first drafts were generally good enough on the first run-through. I could usually plan an essay loosely, and then churn out a fairly decent essay that would pass teacher scrutiny. There wasnā€™t really a need to edit my essays, and because of that I never got good at the editing process.

And now, with these blog posts, I donā€™t really edit them either. I rarely do a big structural audit where I look at how I organized my writing and move things around to make it more comprehensible. The way that it flowed out of my brain is the way that itā€™ll get published.

And I think thatā€™s actually not a bad thing for this blog. Because if I forced myself to undergo an arduous editing process, the whole process of publishing a blog post would become long and painful enough that I wouldnā€™t write every day. Part of what I like is that writing here every day is as easy as I can make it to be.

However, thereā€™s one method of editing that I do employ (and also used on my essays in high school): reading the dang thing out loud, one time, and seeing how it sounds. Thatā€™s the maximum editing process I can endure.

By the way, ā€œout loudā€ here is really more an idea than a literal action. I donā€™t read it physically out loud; instead, I try to listen to what itā€™d sound like while reading silently inside my head.

When I get to the end of writing a blog post, I go back to the beginning and read it through once to make sure that it flows properly, tweaking the writingā€™s flow as I go.

The most important thing about my writing to me is how it flows. I want it to sound like how Iā€™d say it, and that means rewriting sentences so theyā€™re clearer to parse and playing with sentence lengths.

Playing with sentence lengths is a really interesting part. I remember seeing this quote floating around multiple times:

I think that thatā€™s what Iā€™m doing, but I donā€™t know the rules for it. Instead, I just edit my sentences until I feel like the rhythm sounds pleasant.

I care significantly about the rhythm and flow of my writing, so thatā€™s what I edit for. But Iā€™m also lazy, so editing needs to be over as soon as possible. So the way I editā€”the only way I really know how to editā€”is by reading the dang thing out loud (in my head).

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